At Home by Bill Bryson

I aodred this book, which is quintessentially Bryson from start to Finish. He is living in a mid-19th century house, just as I am. His is in England and mine is in Iowa, but I understand how you can look around a place of that age and begin to wonder about how things were constructed and why. But where I would take those thoughts and where he takes them are not so much dissimilar as I would finish in 45 minutes, and Bryson writes a riveting, hilarious fact filled book about how man got to this point in housing structures.
Yes, the road from the prehistoric villages of Catalhöyük and Skara Brae to the condo and gated development is long and rough, and not altogether straight. Bryson considers every aspect of his home, and how it got to be the way it is. Separate dining rooms came into being only because hostesses needed to protect their upholstery from food stains. The brass bed? Its initial appeal was that it was thought to be impervious to bedbugs. Bathing, for more than a millennium, was eschewed as anti-hygienic. "By the eighteenth century," Bryson writes, "the most reliable way to get a bath was to be insane." His observations are certainly not unique--I read many of the Revolutionary American anecdotes in other volumes--but the way he weaves them together is the special art he brings to the table.
A few examples: "Nothing you touch today will have more bloodshed, suffering and woe attached to it than the innocuous twin pillars of your salt and pepper set. . . . An individual rat hasn't got great prospects in life, but his family is effectively ineradicable." Bryson on the Eiffel Tower: "Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materially obsolescent and gloriously pointless all at the same time."
Yes, it is a book filled with trivia--but it is ever so sweetly flowing trivia that I adored reading through. The largest source of animal protein in the Middle Ages? Smoked herring. Need more? The only two creatures that can't make their own Vitamin C? Humans and guinea pigs. The most common cause of accidental death (after car wrecks)? Stairs. The reason smallpox got its name? To distinguish it from the "great pox" of syphilis.
In the midst of figuring out how we got to building the houses we did in the 19th century, he meanders quite a bit, but he also brings it back to his house and it's features and functions--which are similar to other old homes, including my own. If you enjoy this sort of thinking, you will love this book. The funnest way to learn is to laugh while you are doing it, and this book fills that bill as well.